


Checkmate

by treksmix



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Loss, M/M, T'hy'la
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-13
Updated: 2013-07-13
Packaged: 2017-12-20 02:43:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/882017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/treksmix/pseuds/treksmix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Did you ever tell him?" Jim asks one day, and it's all Spock Prime can do to answer the question.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Checkmate

"Did you ever tell him?" Jim asks one day, and it's all that Spock Prime can do to understand the question.

They're seated in his apartment in New Vulcan, sipping the bitter green tea that Jim says he hates. He doesn't, actually, but he likes to say that he does, because then Spock gives him that laughing look, and the corners of his mouth peek upwards in the ghost of what might be considered a smile.

He can see his own Spock buried underneath the lines of the older man's face. This version is warmer, with eyes that laugh even though they shouldn't. He's got lines on his face carved by the whipping, biting sands of time, and when he speaks, he speaks with enough age-earned wisdom to let himself be unrestrained. Or at least, Jim supposes, as unrestrained as any incarnation of Spock could ever be.

"I am unsure of the nature of your inquiry," Spock Prime says evenly, lifting the cup to his lips. Jim doesn't believe that.

"Bullshit," he laughs. He leans back in his chair and meets the old man's eyes. "Don't pussy-foot around the question."

"I did no such thing."

"And again, bullshit."

Spock sighs.

He stares, for a moment, into the depths of his tea, and he is carried by a hurricane of nostalgia into a time long past. The winds carry voices like riders astride their backs, screaming and shouting and whispering, like lovers in the throes of what lovers do best. Only these are not the voices of lovers. Not really. Not as this young Jim sees the word, bright and clear like a star in his mind. This Jim is too young, too unexposed to the true expanse of the universe and all its secrets, to understand.

So Spock Prime looks up at him, and tries to make him see as best he is able.

"You ask if my Jim knew of my feelings for him," he said slowly.

This Jim was as smart as his own, however, and he leans forward and adopts that crooked smile, that gleam in his eyes, that makes Spock remember an identical face from across a chess board. That was long ago, however, and more than a universe away.

"No," Jim says, a hint of triumphant laughter to his tone. "I asked if you ever told him. As in, did you ever say it? Like, out loud."

Spock contemplates this.

Not in words – they were too far buried beneath the weight of denial, drowning in it, gasping for air beneath the sheer volume of the truths they would not face. At his age, in this place, long after his own Jim Kirk was dead, Spock felt that weight still.

When Jim had been alive – his Jim, not this Jim, but the one he had stood beside in his youth – the weight had been the great, copious mass of words they would not say. Now, Spock knew it as the constant reminder of what he should have said; what he should have done and who he should have been. There was no weight more capable of smothering a man, crushing his bones into ashes that blew away in the winds of change, than the bitter, nostalgic burden of regret. In his age and wisdom, he knew that.

Still, though, the question was not answered. They had never said those three words held so highly above all others, but words are not the penultimate visage of speech.

He could recall, and had a million times, the way his captain had lingered just a little too long in his glances. He could remember the way his captain's eyes lit up like supernovas, the way they would burst with excitement or with triumph or with laughter when he smiled.

The supernovas turned on him each night in the captain's quarters, speaking in quiet, complacent tones that reeked of trust and mutual comfort. They would test each other's boundaries and prod each other's thoughts through the moves of pawns and queens across the board. They would never come out and say just what those games were, but in truth, they were conversations. Not the kind where ideas were expressed or truths were exchanged (though sometimes, they were those, too), but the kind of conversations where people were traded.

It was a slow transaction where, piece by piece, jagged slivers of everything they were slipped casually into each other; by the end of it all, those little jigsaw bits formed an understanding, a clear and complicit knowledge of who the other was. Even those pieces that did not mean to slip through, to snake their way into the light from the darkest bastions of their minds, were brought to violent illumination in a quiet, effortless way. Checkmate.

Did that count as an expression, out loud, of love? Perhaps.

Perhaps not.

Maybe there was a clearer articulation in another place, like on the bridge, in the quiet way they read each other like simple truths. Neither of them were simple – they were entire universes contained in the braided veins of physical existence, entire histories and wars and realities wrapped up in the fortified walls of isolated minds. But to each other, they were child's play, familiarity encasing them as each other's translators, linguists well-versed in the meaning of a sideways glance.

Or perhaps their great revelation came in their persistence: perhaps each time they refused to allow death to separate them, it was a quiet "I love you" whispered in a spouse's ear at bedtime. Every sacrificial bullet taken for a brother, a friend, was a gentle peck on the cheek to wish the other goodnight. Every selfless act was a selfish one, Spock realized, an expression of the very ungenerous sentiment of refusing to live without the other. They were selfish animals who would rather die than face the prospect of being alone.

"Spock?" Jim asked, persistent, jolting Spock Prime from his nostalgic reverie. He shook his head and breathed in a ragged, hollow breath. This was a different time. This was a different place.

"I am fine," he said. "I was merely in the midst of my recollection. I am very old, you know." There was laughter in his voice and eyes, the genuine kind, and Jim grinned.

"Quit avoiding it!" he accused jokingly. "Come on, fess up. Did you?"

In that moment, he looked almost identical to the Jim he had known – almost. His Jim was dead, though, remembered by a grave marker that bore only a few words, universes away from where Spock sat. It would take a million chess games, more languages than even Spock knew, to explain the depths of who his Jim Kirk had been. No gravestone could capture his eyes when he won at the game. No anecdotes or memorials could encase the subtleties of his being. Only Spock kept Jim alive, a ghost forever grinning at him from across the chess board, goading him with, "Your move, Mr. Spock."

With the laughter suddenly drained from his eyes, Spock Prime met the eyes of the young, brash Jim who sat before him.

"I did," he said. "And I believe he said it right back."


End file.
